4:44 Last Day on Earth by Abel Ferrara

4:44 Last Day on Earth by Abel Ferrara

A successful actor and his younger painter girlfriend spend their last day together in New York City before the world comes to an end at 4:44am.

Apparently there is no chaos on the night of the apocalypse, people casually hang out at bars, they chitchat on Skype, the streets are clear for safe driving and you can even have Vietnamese food delivered to your apartment. The apocalypse itself is not much discussed, but everybody seems to be relatively accepting of their ordeal.

What drew me to the film was Willem Dafoe in an apocalyptic movie. To cut it short, this movie has no character, no plot, and does nothing interesting with the apocalypse. It wasted Willem Dafoe. His character Cisco appears to be concerned about the end but cannot seem to get his priorities straight. He talks to himself on the rooftop of his New York apartmett, wanders around to see friends and contacts his loved ones on Skype to tell them he loves them. He claims to love his girlfriend Skye but doesn’t do much to show it other than making love to her. Is there more he can do to show them he cares? What does he want? I am not really sure.

Shanyn Leigh is really horrid as Skye. To be fair, I haven’t seen her other works. I don’t know if it’s a just bad performance or the lack of character that she is given to play. The worst part is I think it’s both. Skye is annoying in the same way as Maria Schneider was from Last Tango in Paris. She’s pretentious, fragile and passive. Could she be frail because the world is ending? I have no clue. I never found myself sympathizing or rooting for her. There’s a scene where Shanyn Leigh witnesses Willem Dafoe talking to his ex-wife via Skype and goes hysterical and it is cringing to watch. The rest of the time all she does is sit around on the floor working on her abstract painting. When one coat of paint is done, she sets down an electric fan to dry it. Yes! You get to watch paint dry in this movie! And you know what? It’s not a day at the zoo. If they weren’t going to anything with her character, Ferrara may as well have casted someone more attractive or more interesting to play the part. Yes, I know that’s a horrible thing to say but there was nothing going on to keep me invested in these characters or situations. None of these characters act believably to their situation.

Just to tread back for a minute, there is nothing wrong with having characters paint on film. It’s a pretty tricky thing to make work, but it’s been done before. Thus far, I have only see it in 2 Takeshi Kitano films (Hana-bi and Achilles and the Tortoise), he manages to develop character with his characters painting. In Hana-bi, a retired policeman who is confined to a wheelchair is given a set of paints and a beret by the protagonist. He starts to paint and we see a series of his paintings as they improve and become livelier paintings. We see that he slowly finds the purpose in his life again and it’s quite poetic. There’s nothing even close to the craft that can pull that off in this film. I did not expect it but I’m citing Kitano to say that Abel Ferrara does not make attempt anything interesting at all.

What makes it worse is there are archival footage of the Dalai Lama shown on Cisco and Skye’s television to directly tell you the director’s message. I have seen this level of filmmaking during my 2nd year of film school. I worked on an apocalyptic-themed student film similar to this movie. A real raspberry. That 14-minute short ended with a series of archival footage splicing Gandi, the Dalai Lama, Stalin and Hitler together, of which the director reasoned that’s what made his film a social commentary. Assuming Abel Ferrara has more experience than my idiot classmate, how could you not know how uninteresting this was? What was he trying to say about people at the end?

Having seen a series of apocalyptic films done this year, I say go see Melancholia or Perfect Sense. 4:44 Last Day on Earth frustrated and angered me till the middle, and towards I just decided to let go and not to get mad over this movie. I do not know how one can manage to make the apocalypse boring but this certainly takes that mantle.

Though I’d really like to keep the number to that Vietnamese restaurant. In case the end is near, I like to have some Pho delivered to my place.

Perfect Sense by David Mackenzie

Perfect Sense by David Mackenzie

A chef and an epidemiologist fall in love just as a global epidemic begins to rob the world’s population of their sensory perceptions.

Perfect Sense presents the idea of the apocalypse in a more personal (and lower budget) way. What are the sensations that make up your life? What does each sense mean to you? What triggers a happy memory? A sad memory? As each human sense fades away one by one, human joys and memories fade away, society crumbles, the way we connect goes away and people start to lose touch with humanity. Or do we really lose joy and memories at all? Are we capable of surviving through it?

The disease in the film is quite ridiculous if you think about it. That does not matter. It’s working as a metaphor and we see how the epidemic affects the world. In another movie, they would focus on solving the origin of the epidemic and save mankind before all our senses go away (like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion). Perfect Sense focuses on the apocalypse through the relationship between its two protagonists Michael and Susan (played by Ewan McGregor and Eva Green) and how they’re reacting to the situation. Their professions allow us to peek at what’s going on in the outside world. Michael’s job as a cook deals in giving people sensation but restaurants have become obsolete after people lose their sense of taste. We see how his restaurant deals with it. Susan’s job shows the science side of the investigative process of the epidemic. However, the melancholic  gloom in the film gives you the feeling that they’ll never really know.

The romance between Michael and Susan is not random. It’s more than he is handsome and she is gorgeous. What makes it romantic is that Susan’s scent was the last thing he smelled on the night they both completely lost their sense of smell. The movie doesn’t over-punctuate that to make it cute. No, what I appreciated about this stroke was that the collapse of the world pushes them together into a genuine connection. Michael and Susan both fight against the loss of their senses together, trying to enjoy what they can out of life.

Ewan McGregor gives a very natural performance as Michael who starts off as a disconnected person and later comes to appreciate life.I always thought there was something naturally dark about Eva Green. There’s something brooding beneath her cold stare (even when she was Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale) and I’m glad director David Mackenzie utilized that to tell this story. I’m about to review Womb next and I’ll probably have the chance to elaborate more on Eva Green later. I liked this romance and how it developed in the context of the story. There’s a scene where the couple reveals their deep dark secrets to each other that was rather noteworthy.

You can practically watch this back-to-back with Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. (I’m saying this for comparison’s sake, I would not suggest this as a double feature. Unless you like your gloom, then carry on.) Perfect Sense accomplishes what good science fiction does – it made me think about the human condition. I thought about the limits of man, what we are capable of, how we wake up to appreciate the little things after they have been taken away from us and how the human spirit strives to survive even in the worst hopeless moments.

And yeah, I really do not want to lose my eyesight, hearing, sense of taste, smell or touch. Not even if Eva Green was my lover. Well…

Miss Bala by Gerardo Naranjo

Miss Bala by Gerardo Naranjo

Miss Bala tells the story of Laura Guerrero (played by Stephanie Sigman), who dreams of becoming a beauty contest queen in a Mexico dominated by organized crime.

I am not familiar with what life is like in Mexico, so it was very interesting to follow Laura as she is taken through the inner world of the Mexican drug cartels. There are some very cruel moments of violence and I found myself scared for this girl the whole time. Not to sound distasteful, but I was really scared that she was going to be raped. Any time a gangster with a machine gun comes up to Laura, I was thinking, “He can totally do it right now. There’s nothing stopping him!” When she’s not being threatened sexually, it was the possibility of her being shot to death. There are a few long take sequences in the film where Laura dodging crossfire in gun battle that puts you in the moment. We see how the violence and the corruption eventually weighs down on this girl, eventually corrupts her dream and sucks the living soul out of her.

However, Miss Bala commits the sin of choosing its message over its protagonist in its third act. Laura becomes progressively passive and ends up being an inactive character who simply observes and obeys the orders she’s given by the gangsters. Stephanie Sigman is a competent lead actress and carries the film but her character has no motivation from that point onwards. It builds to an open ending that I thought was too “open” for its own good. The film wants to present Laura as an innocent victim caught in the middle of all this turmoil, but I still think the victim angle can still be clear with her actively trying to accomplish a goal. It’s as if director Gerardo Naranjo thought it would be too much and settled on his presenting his message but the audience definitely was hungry for that extra mile. I’m sure that wasn’t Naranjo’s goal. That said, Miss Bala still gripped me for the first two thirds.

It’s a nice piece of “issue-tainment” nonetheless.

Red State by Kevin Smith

Red State by Kevin Smith

A group of teens receive an online invitation for sex, though they soon encounter fundamentalists with a much more sinister agenda.

I used to be a Kevin Smith fan. I liked all his work up till Clerks 2. I would look up funny clips of his speeches and occasionally read his blog. Zack and Miri Make A Porno made me laugh but it was not something I could recommend to somebody else. I thought Cop Out was one big juicy raspberry but it was not the reason why I do not care for his work anymore. The real reason is because he’s gotten so whiny these couple of years it’s just a turn-off listening to him talk about anything these days. As someone who wants to work in the film in industry, I could not empathize with his view of film critics and/or Hollywood politics. I purely see those as good problems to have at this point. I totally understand and respect that he is probably in a different stage in life than me but I just cannot help it. Sorry.  On with the review…

Michael Parks is really good and brings a muted creepiness as Reverend Abin Cooper, but he needs subtitles. I understood Jeff Bridges in True Grit word for word and still found Parks’ drawl scratchy delivery difficult at times. Melissa Leo goes over-the-top. That’s all I have to say about the acting.

Red State titters between being a satire, a horror film and a late night B action movie. All three genres end up competing against each other. The horror was not horrific enough; it’s watered down once the action kicks in. That’s a problem because it’s satiric metaphors are never fully physicalized and they end up being stated through dialogue. The violence is meant to be taken seriously but there’s a scene involving a cop receiving a head shot outside Abin Cooper’s house that looked  too funny to be shocking. At the final dialogue set piece with Agent Joseph Keenan (played by John Goodman), it seems like the film is giving you permission to laugh at what’s going on, but I was not sure if I was supposed to. What floats to the surface after all this genre clashing is the message of the film, which seems too on-the-nose. After watching Red State, I could not recall a specific scene or any characters (besides Michael Parks) that were memorable. What I can tell you is what Smith thinks is wrong with America.

It’s nice to see Kevin Smith write in a different voice and it’s too bad he claims to have only one more movie in him before quitting as a filmmaker (I do not believe this at all). I assume his cinematographer Dave Klein must be thrilled to finally be able to pan the camera, do handheld and use a crane shot. As he admits, he’s not the strongest director in the world. Horror is a visual medium and he would probably benefit in a genre that is more based on writing. But you know what? It’s a new direction! It’s something new from him. So again, I must go back to … I don’t know what the hell he is being so whiny about!

Sleeping Beauty by Julia Leigh

Sleeping Beauty by Julia Leigh

Lucy (played by Emily Browning) is a a young university student who does a variety of odd jobs to support her education. She volunteers as a test subject in a lab, a waitress in a cafe, a copy girl in an office, and sits in a high class bar offering herself as an escort. One day, she’s interviewed by Carol (played by Rachael Blake), and ends up doing erotic freelance work in which she is required to be in a drug-induced sleep in bed alongside paying customers. Things ensue.

I saw the trailer for this film on Apple Trailers and read that it played in Cannes. The trailer has all these film critic quotes paying it compliments so I decided to check it out.

The film asks the audience to be afraid for Lucy, that somehow sleeping side these men will somehow rob her innocence. Admittedly I was afraid for her the first two times, only because she is a girl who’s voluntarily put to sleep while these customers are brought in to do anything they want to her except intercourse. After all, it’s only a verbal agreement. Nothing is stopping them from putting it in. By the third time, I was not afraid for her any longer. The first two sleeping sessions should have built up to the third, but it did not.  My chivalry and sense of danger had dissipated and I needed more from the story to care about this girl in this horrible situation. Then I realized, she’s not innocent at all if it’s her third time. And I found this problematic with the movie.

We are given hints of Lucy’s backstory is several scenes. It’s not given with exposition but they are so few and far between it leaves way too many gaps for the audience to construct a real sense of pathos for Lucy. It creates more questions. What’s Lucy’s major? What’s her dream? Why is she financially independent? This is a case of a director being too subtle for her own good. It was as if Julia Leigh was aware of giving exposition in a story and wanted to leave the appropriate amount of empty space for the audience to imagine her past, but ended up leaving too much.

Emily Browning’s role in Sucker Punch and this film reminds me of how the young Natalie Portman used to have a penchant for Lolita-like roles. Part of Browning’s acting presence in Sleeping Beauty is her titillating the audience with her youthful physicality. I was very aware of that in this film because at times I was titillated and other times watching her made me uncomfortable. She had to bear all for this performance and it’s too bad because nothing was said with the nudity. It’s not her fault, she’s a competent actress who is doing what her director is telling her to do. It begs the question, what was Julia Leigh’s objective with this story?

The cinematography attempts an empty creepy tension through its wide still shots, it succeeds part of the time depending on what’s going on, but part of the time it is quite bland. There’s some nice art direction in these locations. To the film’s credit, the wide shots manage to build up to one very effective close-up when an old customer enters with Carol, sits on the bedside next to a sleeping Lucy and tells this very psychotic story straight into the camera. I was creeped out by the old man so much I could not follow the details of what his story was about. What scared me was the prospect of what he was about to do once he was alone with Lucy. But overall, swinging from titillating to creepy to bland, there was nothing consistent enough to  grip me.

Nudity can be powerful in a story when used correctly in the right context, examples such as Monica Bellucci in Irreversible, Tang Wei in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution or even Elena Anaya in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In. I thought about what Julia Leigh wanted to say with the nudity. At one point, it seemed to be the lifeless clinical nudity akin to how Stanley Kubrick used nudity in Eyes Wide Shut and A Clockwork Orange. Is the director using nudity as a symbol of women selling their souls for money through her almost-prostitution-like job? And then I snapped myself out of that notion. “No no no…” I told myself, “You’re not getting away with this.” That’s what Sleeping Beauty was trying to be, but not what it achieved.

Love in the Buff by Edmond Pang Ho Cheung

Love in the Buff by Edmond Pang Ho Cheung

The sequel to 2010′s Love in a Puff continues the story of Jimmy and Cherie (played by Shawn Yue and Miriam Yeung), who met and fell in love through their outdoor office smoking breaks (after the 2007 Hong Kong government indoor smoking ban). Five months after the events in the first film, Jimmy and Cherie face more difficulties in their romantic relationship as they split up and both individually end up in Beijing as they follow their jobs to China’s capital city, and both begin new relationships there. But despite their best efforts they can’t seem to keep away from each other.

Edmond Pang Ho Cheung is a promising writer/director that always puts out off-kilter interesting work. Isabella and Exodus still remain my favourite Pang Ho Cheung films. The only Pang film I did not like was the Category III  horror film Dream Home for it’s over-excessive satirical violence that ran out of steam. Love in the Buff was released in its original Cantonese language dub in Mainland theatres (which is a first! Something I’ve wanted to see for my entire teenage life), and that’s how I saw it. Part of the sell of the movie is watching celebrities swear onscreen, so it was important that I saw it in Cantonese. I laughed more than six times and was glad to see the mandarin-speaking locals next to me laughing as well in its sharply-written dialogue set pieces. For this reason, the film will be lost on English-speaking audiences.

In a way, the film was made specific to me. It was about Hong Kong people living in Beijing. The locations were all the restaurants and places where Cantonese people congregate. In fact, there was an establishing shot of the mall I was watching the movie in. So the film briefly gave me a non-acid mind trip. Beijing is presented in a non-touristy gaze and the film addresses the cultural interaction between Hong Kongers and Mainlanders. Together with the swearing, the film felt real and life-like. So this all added an extra layer for me.

By the middle, the film was bringing up hints of that romantic comedy trope in which the conflict would be easily resolved if the protagonists told each other how they felt, instead of dragging the movie for another 20 minutes. That usually annoys me as it always seems to exist only to prolong the film to the 90-minute mark. I would have been annoyed but Pang does something interesting with it. The non-communication is exactly the problem between Jimmy and Cherie. They are a couple who never knows the right time to say the right things to each other and it keeps creating rifts between them. Hence the need for the many supporting characters who serve as their confidants, who talk to them while they’re around each other. There are two tongue-in-cheek celebrity gags with Huang Xiaoming and Ekin Cheng. I preferred the latter gag, the former was a bit too cheeky “wink wink” in-jokey for me. Pang makes all these conversations fun with witty lines, innuendoes and profanity. I could see it all being shorter, but it was fun.

Love in the Buff really does test the likability of its two leads with the audience. Jimmy and Cherie are pretty real in the sense that they aren’t likeable all the time. In fact, they’re even downright shitty at times the way they treat their present lovers Sam and Youyou (played by Zheng Xu and Mini Yang). Sometimes you want to go up to slap both of them. I was worried that the film will lose me and drag along. It did not. The film makes these characters sympathetic by showing how well Jimmy and Cherie fit together as a couple. To quote John Cusack from High Fidelity, “Some people just feel like home.” And with that, the film ultimately won me over by the end.

Even though, if it were me, I’d totally choose Mini Yang as my movie girlfriend. An air hostess who takes Polaroids? Seriously? Sign me up! Man, I have a new crush.